WHAT IS ANTHOLOJAM?

Antholojam is an attempt at putting together a series of short games games on a theme, curated by specific creators of all kinds of walks of life, and distributing them online under the pay-what-you-want-including-nothing model. This is the first antholojam, and games created will have the theme Golden Age Sci-Fi to pay tribute to the format we pulled inspiration from. Another jam, uncurated and open to everyone, is running at the same time on itch.io.

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- PARTICIPANTS -

Here are the pitches for round 1!

James Snow & E. N. Hempstead

The Valkyries of Vela is a tabletop game themed around the Golden Age of Sci-Fi and the exciting adventures of tabletop-style dungeon crawling. Players will form a party of up to five members of the Valkyries of Vela Special Forces. They will be armed with skills as sharp as their wits and wonderful weapons like rayguns, miniguns and Very Sharp Knives. Each will have their own special talents and stats which will be their key to survival. Down in the caverns you will find traps and monsters, but also items to help you, dropped by previous explorers. You will choose a class to take into the underground burrows of alien monsters known only as ‘Bugs’. You will then randomly select tiles and reveal the caverns ahead of you. You will be given a randomised objectives and have to fight through hordes of alien monsters to complete them.

Team Gigglesquid

(Craig "Hambleton" Ham, Peter "Shoehead" Keenan, Kris "Sledra" Holton, Kimberly Parker, and Damon Reece.) STEAL MY ARTIFICIAL HEART is a short visual novel that takes place in a robot city on the moon, where you, as the literally-fresh-out-of-the-box robot P.I., will have to unravel the mystery of a murder most foul.

Sophie Houlden

Sophie is a solo dev making a game about a team of people on a remote planet where things aren't going entirely to plan...

Team Ryrin Games

(Daniel Richmond, Megan Hoolehan, Robert Judd, & MJ Branden) Team Ryrin Games is working on a choose-your-own-adventure style single player card game where you choose one of the daring adventurers who seek to travel to THE FUTURE. There will be goals to collect depending on your adventurer, but the emphasis is on crafting a unique story each time you play.

Gritfish

You never know what will be the last thing you say to someone. On a transport ship leaving earth, a passenger kills time by scrolling through the messages of their social media feed. As the ship leaves and moves further and further away from home, the delay between sending messages and their arrival lengthens. What feels like minutes on the ship is hours, days, weeks, even years back on Earth. Each refresh of the timeline is a tiny window into the past. What will you do in those precious few moments as the lives of everyone you know pass by?

A signal from Mars has all the nations of Earth teaming up to pay a visit to the Red Planet. Well-trained and long-pampered representatives from each nation came together to travel through space: 5 were selected on how well they would represent their nation and their planet in the hopes of impressing this new Mars society. And to Mars they went. Upon arriving, they found a surreal desert out of a dream, and no intelligent life to be found. These five adults, many poorly developed in regards to maturity, identity, and attitude, many from completely separate or rival cultures, are forced to survive together on a planet with unknown terrors and no comfort in familiarity.

Tom McHenry

TONIGHT DIES THE MOON - From Tom McHenry, author of HORSE MASTER: THE GAME OF HORSE MASTERY, comes a new game about life during war between Earth and the Moon. Fall in love, subsistence farm, complete spreadsheets, and wear colorful jumpsuits-- all in the far-flung world of the year 2000!

Andrew Baillie

Intergalactic Ambassador (Working title??) is a game where the player takes on the role of a intergalactic ambassador on Earth tasked with evaluating new intergalactic arrivals to the Earth. Players interact with aliens from their appearance in the space around Earth to their eventual landing. The ultimate decision is for the players to decide through their interactions with the aliens whether they are to be trusted or are arriving as invaders

Ice Water Games

Ice Water Games is a new company that has just released their first title—Eidolon, a narrative exploration game set in post-human Western Washington. We’re a loose collection of writers, programmers, and artists who come together on a project-by-project basis. For Antholojam, Ice Water Games is Kevin Maxon, Zoe Vartanian, Isa Hutchinson, Shadie Hijazi, Jeffrey Klinicke, Adam Murgittroyd, and Michael Bell. In a future world where humanity has developed the technology to explore beyond consciousness, past the outermost fringes of waking reality, a team of researchers takes the first journey to the afterlife.

Caelyn Sandel, Carolyn VanEseltine, Danielle Church, & Jamie Sandel

You are a human traveler, alone in Quaoar's spaceport bar with nothing to your name but a vivid imagination and a willingness to lie about your travels. You've attracted the attention of a small audience -- two aliens, a robot, and a talking dog -- and they're ready to listen to your story, as long as you don't annoy them too much. Spin your story with the tools you have available: the dinner table is your stage, utensils and items of food the players in your narrative. As you tell the story, your audience will talk back, asking questions that you'll need to answer to keep the story going.

Wonder Games

We're making a base-building game, set on an alien planet which is riddled with mystery and intrigue. The basic goal is to terraform and mine the landscape, in order to construct habitats which will link up to form a transit network. Resources from one, finished location will feed into the next and so on, until you come to build a space elevator. Strip-mining rays and chrome fittings abound, with a relatively light story told through dialogue with your team of contractors.

Micah Johnston & Matt Starsoneck

As-yet-untitled point-and-click adventure. It takes place in the near future, in an abandoned industrial district. You play as an employee of a government agency sent in to investigate high power usage and construction activity in the district, which it turns out is the work of some runaway AIs building data centers to house themselves as they expand.

Connor Sherlock

31/439 (working title): The year is 2130. A vessel from interstellar space - the first concrete proof that humanity is not alone in the universe - has entered our solar system and is hurtling towards our sun. As the only ship capable of reaching it in time, you are tasked with discovering it's purpose. Venture inside the allegedly lifeless thing and divine what you can. From the creator of The Rapture Is Here And You Will Be Forcibly Removed From Your Home.

Mint & Dualhammers

You're a miner out looking for planets in deep space. The computer makes out several signatures of planets light years away, and an awful lot of anomalous readings light up your small ship. As you exit cryosleep you need to narrow down your options and make the risky and bold maneuvers necessary to find and understand the sources of these transmissions. A choose your own adventure with 80s vector images, and light resource management that depends on your choices and impacts your options.

Team Red Shirts

Action! Adventure! Aliens! Space Journey!™ has it all! ...Or it would, if the director of the cult TV-show hadn’t lost the script for this week’s episode! It’s up to you, the actors, to scramble a story together and put on a show-saving performance! Space Journey!™ is a light and fun role-playing game that puts you and your friends on the set of a classic sci-fi show amidst a crisis, interpreting the crew of a starship on a brave mission to explore the edges of the known universe.Team Red Shirts is composed of Jack Timmons, Dr. Lorin Grieve, Marion VA Hemming, and Pablo F. Quarta.

Check back in December!

The games will be up here when finished.

- WHAT IS ANTHOLOJAM -

Jam will run from Nov 19th until Dec 19th.
Players should be able to experience the totality of the game in under one hour.
Game anthology will be pay what you want, including nothing.
Each developer will get an even share of the revenue and keep their rights.
Games will incorporate the theme, "Golden Age Of Sci-Fi"
Games will not be shitty to anyone.
An uncurated itch.io jam is available and open to everyone.
Games are pretty cool, y'all.

Antholojam is an experiment thought up by Zoe Quinn and run by Zoe & Alex Lifschitz.